Not a Fiction

3.1
YaodeJN: A Cognitive Approach to Image-Making

PENG Hsing-Kai From your work over the years—starting in 2015 and through all your client projects—there’s this consistent quality. It triggers something sharp, vacant, and fleeting in the senses. It feels almost biological, rather than psychological or cultural. Given your background in number theory and physics, would you say this is a kind of cognitive science in practice?

Yaode JN It’s definitely a sensation unique to images. The initial jolt that images provoke in people—it’s not based on cultural references or symbolism. For me, cultural symbols don’t hold much value. What I’m after is using visual language to make people confront the strangeness inside themselves. It’s like music—sometimes it just takes one element, or a very slight shift in arrangement, to deliver something raw, shocking, or weirdly natural.

PENG Hsing-Kai I see cultural symbols as a kind of collective understanding that’s already been numbed. Images once considered vulgar or taboo were once confined to the shadows of society, but now they’re everywhere—on Instagram, in the news, on OnlyFans. What used to be shocking in private is now completely normalised.

Yaode JN Exactly. That’s the trap of culture. The meaning of a symbol is something constructed, and over time, after enough exposure, reinterpretation, and refinement, it just gets absorbed into the norm. What’s left is just a plain reference, and the space for actual sensation disappears. Sure, we can still use cultural symbols as a kind of guide for the audience—to enhance a certain feeling—but to me, what really matters in image-making is staying aware of the initial impact.

PENG Hsing-Kai Every creator has a different kind of sensitivity to those first impressions. Designers after the war often tapped into something swelling, resonant—like a constant low-frequency hum. Yours feels more like the sensation of a fine, soft needle puncturing cleanly and instantly. It leaves a sharp mark on the viewer’s perceptual network—but you can’t get that same feeling by studying the image or looking at it over and over again. It’s hard to even describe in words. Whether or not the creator is aware of this—that’s what decides how far their artistic life can go.

Yaode JN Those indescribable sensations are exactly what creators should keep chasing. If you stop exploring, the work ends up just packaging content. It’s no longer about the image itself. When a creator stumbles upon a visual phenomenon and feels something strange—how do they capture that? What allowed them to do it in the first place? Was it pure instinct? Or life experience giving them the ability to handle sensation?

If you follow their work over time, you’ll see whether they’ve actually become aware of the kinds of intensity they’re producing. No one expects an artist to remain at their peak forever. Just having touched it once is already precious. But once someone reaches that stage, we need to be able to recognise it.

PENG Hsing-Kai There are designers who remain consistent their whole lives—fully aware of the symbolic value in their work. Their visual language can evolve over decades. Kim Do-Hyung is real, objective proof of this topic. But more often, we’ve seen people who once touched something essential in image-making, and then just... lost it. Maybe they never realised what they had. Or maybe their environment never gave them the space to realise it.

3.2
LIU Yu-Ju: Envelopment

Yaode JN Your earlier work had those fluorescent plant-like colours and intricate painterly textures, but it’s shifted—now it feels almost Gothic and overwhelming, like Cologne Cathedral. The scale’s changed too, from photographic fragments to vast spatial canvases. What does this shift mean for your practice?

LIU Yu-Ju Painting’s always been a deep influence for me—especially styles that really emphasise flatness. I find it fascinating to explore how a flat surface can still suggest depth or spatial feeling. I recently saw Julie Mehretu: A Trace of the Radical Imagination at MCA. Her work isn’t just painting—she starts by photographing architecture in cities, turns that into a blurry base layer, then adds in outlines of space, collage, and spray paint, building up layers. She uses that structure to talk about politics and geography, and that sense of spatial construction really stuck with me.

I hadn’t really thought of my own work as creating an “enveloping” feeling, but maybe it does. I’ve always wanted to build a world within a flat plane—something immersive, a space the viewer can sink into and explore.

Yaode JN Like that projection piece you showed at NTNU—it felt like you were holding a camera in an endless space, and where you pointed it didn’t even matter.

PENG Hsing-Kai That’s a really unique perspective in your work. When we talk about constructed worlds, take Jonathan Zawada for example—his aesthetic feels like he’s documenting flora and fauna on some alien planet. If one plant looks a certain way, you’d expect the others in that world to follow suit. But your work doesn’t describe the things in the world, it feels like it’s describing the space itself. Like in FKA Twigs’ LP1 with the greenish cyan one. But instead of just using a flat colour to suggest infinity, you actually draw out that envelopment—the sensation of being wrapped in space.

LIU Yu-Ju I saw Taishi Urakawa’s work last year—2023—and before that I’d assumed it was all digital. But when I saw it in person, I realised it was hand-painted with actual pigments. That contrast really surprised me. It had this blurry quality, a strange way of shaping space that I found so intriguing. I still don’t have a clear direction yet. I’m still figuring things out. Lately I’ve been thinking about shifting to new media—maybe that’ll open up new possibilities.

3.3
PENG Hsing-Kai: Commonality and Empathy

Andy Chen There’s always this sense of connection in your work—a feeling of openness and equality. Where does that come from? And after 2020, your work started to feel almost noble, like fine art. What brought about that shift? How do you balance values like equality and nobility in your images?

PENG Hsing-Kai I think it comes from my taste in music. I’m really drawn to sounds that are bright, transparent, full of air—though not necessarily clean. Tracks like Laura Mvula’s Green Garden or Faye Wong’s The New Roommate (王菲, 新房客)—the images they create in my mind, I find them deeply moving. It’s like there’s this invisible membrane between us, a subtle distance. I would filter out that specific emotional texture, that soft spatial resonance.

I’ve always had this obsession with the feeling of reverence—I don’t think I’m important, but I love the sensation of revering something. Pre-industrial European art had this sense of grace, intricacy, a spirit of awe. That’s always fascinated me. After I started studying image history and classical painting, I tried to consciously fold that feeling into my work. Before that, I’d experimented with public domain images from pre-WWI, and works from the realism to Impressionism period in the 18th century. But it all felt not quite devout enough.

Yaode JN So do you want people to worship you? Or do you want to make something that’s worthy of worship?

PENG Hsing-Kai Not at all. I don’t think of my work as some kind of self-deifying pursuit. I’m trying to introduce the presence of something—something out there worth admiring or fearing. The work just acts as a kind of interface, and I’m simply one of the people who happened to notice it. Maybe that’s why my work naturally comes across as egalitarian, flattening the hierarchy between the viewer and the artist. Being in a state of awe makes me genuinely happy, but maybe I’ve gotten older—I haven’t found anything to revere in a while. There’s been this nagging emptiness in me the last few years.

Andy Chen Back when we worked on the Commonality and Empathy party visuals, you mentioned that sometimes, while creating, it feels like the work isn’t even yours. Have you figured out why you get into that state?

PENG Hsing-Kai Hmm... after I published my book in 2018, I spent three years trying to live up to the standard I’d set in writing. Back then, the ideas were more refined than my actual work. I also realised my output lacks craft value... my skills don’t hold much weight historically. What I’m good at is selecting, combining, reorganising resources into something coherent with maximum efficiency.

I get excited by distilled concepts in academic writing. When scholars summarise their entire field in a clean, powerful paragraph—that thrill is similar to what I feel when I encounter truly transcendent art. I collect shared, elevated experiences across disciplines and translate them into visual form. To be honest, there’s not much technical difficulty in my design. What matters is that the final result expresses the collective resonance of everyone involved in the project—and my own intention.

3.4
Andy Chen: The Terrarium

PENG Hsing-Kai Whether it’s your geometric pieces or your 3D work, there’s always this strange sense of “organic inorganics” in your images. It’s as if everything—shapes, materials—feels “plant-like.” You can’t see it on a macro level, but on a microscopic scale, you get the sense that every cell is pulsing with life. Are you aware of this when you’re creating?

Andy Chen It’s only recently that I’ve started to look at it more seriously. I do have this habit of getting obsessed with small details—I kind of fall into them—and that seems to show up in my work. I’ve always thought of my pieces as little boxes, like petri dishes or observation chambers for microorganisms. They hold colour, texture, and whatever state those things are in, all sealed inside.

In the future, I’d like to invite viewers into these boxes. Let them influence how the “organisms” inside grow, just by looking. Thinking back, maybe the reason I gradually moved away from geometric structures is that I was trying to show this growing process—trying out different materials to mimic that evolution, to illustrate the different stages of being observed.

Yaode JN Looking at your work always gives me that feeling of watching an ant nest or a beehive—some kind of insect colony, always shifting, always swarming. Do you think this mental image reflects how you perceive reality?

Andy Chen Yeah, that’s actually a great description. The work starts off as a kind of patchwork collection—gathering objects I’ve sensed or felt something from, putting them all in one place. But when my perception of those objects changes—even something as flat as a leaf, when viewed under a microscope, shows a whole world of texture—I start to introduce elements of chance, to “liberate” their forms.

The original collection falls apart, and something else takes over—something grotesque, pathological, disturbing. A kind of expanding organic tissue, pushing past logical expectations. The shapes start to gain movement, evolve, mutate into something... indefinite.

Thinking about it, my two-dimensional work doesn’t quite feel like “boxes” in the same way. I suppose what I’m trying to explore is what happens when I put an idea into one of these three-dimensional petri dishes—what it grows into, what it becomes.